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LOL if your grandmother was any good at cooking. I don't have any photos of my Nan, but imagine a trashier version of this:  Guide to being Nan: Drink whisky and ginger ale. Smoke revolting brown cigarettes. Drop cigarette ash onto carpets, clothes, furniture, vinyl records. Shout at your husband. Teach your husband's budgie to repeat insults about local politicians. Take benzos and barbiturates and fall asleep in front of the Benny Hill show. Wear long false fingernails that always have crumbs and cream stuck under them. Keep bars of Whittaker's chocolate in your lingerie drawer. Be able to complete a cryptic crossword in ten minutes. Be deeply unhappy, perhaps because your father made you leave school when you were 11 to go be a housemaid. Perhaps because you were never any good at being a housewife but it was the only option you had. Perhaps because you married the wrong man a couple of months after your fiancee got killed in world war two. My grandmother's influence on my cooking was negative. I think the reason my father learned to cook spectacularly well at a time when New Zealand men barely entered the kitchen is that he couldn't stand his mother's cooking. My cooking is greatly influenced by my father's cooking. There were, however, things Nan was very good at cooking. The good Nan did the best roast potatoes: golden, crunchy, incredible. She also did great chips (cooked in dripping of course, which was then reused repeatedly) and amazing pan-fried flounder. She had a randomly good way of cooking cabbage. She also made something called a farmhouse omelet which was like a cross between a frittata and a souffle. the rest My grandfather won a microwave in a game of golf in 1981. Nan used to roast chicken in it. By roast, I mean stick a chicken in it to go round and round for 20 minutes and then pull it out still bleeding and serve it. Nan loved chocolate and cream. Unfortunately she had poor attention to detail. There were a lot of ants in Auckland and most of them ended up in her sugarbowl. They then ended up in the cream. A favourite was homemade meringues with strips of baking paper stuck to the bottom and lashings of dead-ant cream. She regularly made chocolate cake for her grandchildren. In one chocolate cake the combined grandkids discovered two long strips of baking paper, two half eggshells and one false fingernail. ICSA 64 menu Bloody chicken with golden crunchy potatoes and Grandmother's cabbage, followed by chocolate cake with dead-ant eggshell cream and false fingernails. Golden crunchy potatoes Peel (I never normally would peel potatoes, but for this it's important) and quarter or halve your potatoes. Use a good, floury potato: I used Agria. Place in a pot of cold, salty water, bring to the boil and then simmer for around 15 minutes. You don't need to be too finicky about timing. I put them on before I started prepping the chicken, and took them off when I had shoved the chicken in the oven.  Use a fork to drag lines in the potatoes in the potatoes on all sides, giving them a corduroy effect. (They're just sitting on the stovetop because I didn't have much benchspace. I'm not actually doing anything with them there)  Put them in a roasting dish or suchlike and add blobs of dripping and a generous sprinkling of salt. I probably used too much dripping, but any excess gets blotted off at the end anyway.  Put in oven to roast with whatever you're roasting. If you're doing something that takes longer than an hour, I'd hold off until there's about an hour left of cooking time. Turn gently with a spoon from time to time. When you take your meat out to rest it, turn the oven up and blast the potatoes until they're truly golden.  Obviously you're going to drain them really well on paper towels. Bloody chicken Yeah, I'm not microwaving a chicken. And though I have eaten intentionally semi-raw chicken in Japan, I'm not doing that here either. For me, the main thing I wanted to try was the Nan-style potatoes in dripping (which I've never made before) and the sauteed cabbage. The other things were just for the hell of it. So for the chicken, red wine will have to represent the bleeding roast chicken of my childhood. I took an Anthony Bourdain recipe for roast chicken with white wine and hosed around with it. First, I made a red wine herb butter. I softened butter and added a few basil leaves (not sure why), some flatleaf parsley, thyme and rosemary  I mixed in red wine and a touch of balsamic and mushed it together and put it in the fridge  To be honest I did that before I started the potatoes. I also sauteed some onions (3 mins over high heat, 6 over medium) until brown, because I felt like I'd need them  I rubbed the bird down with salt and with salt and pepper, the shoved half an orange (I didn't have a lemon handy, OK), half an onion a spring of rosemary and a spring of thyme up its cloaca. To be honest I'm never sure if there's any point in this beyond ritual humiliation of the bird. I put half the browned onions in the roasting dish (yeah, I used a cast-iron frying pan, I'm lazy), laid the chook on top of them, then pushed a tablespoon of herb butter under each side of the breast skin.  I rubbed most of the rest of the herb butter into the skin, leaving about 2 tablespoons aside. Then I poured half a cup of red wine onto the chicken.  I roasted it for thirty minutes at 375F/190C, basting occasionally, then for another 25 minutes at 450F/230C. Then it got to rest outside the oven for 15 minutes:  When it was time to finish things off, I took the chicken out of the pan, skimmed quite a bit of fat from the pan, then put it on the stove. I added half a cup of red wine and the reserved browned onion.  Then I brought it to the boil, simmered until reduced a bit, and added the remaining herb butter  It didn't look as blood red as I had hoped, but it was a lovely accompaniment to the accompaniments. Grandmother's cabbage While the chicken was resting and the potatoes were having their final blast, I thinly sliced onion and cabbage (about quarter of an onion per quarter of a cabbage)  Then I gently sauteed the onion until beginning to go soft  Added the cabbage and sauteed until brighter green, and sprinkled with caraway seeds and salt. Then I served everything and my phone made it look like a shot from an 80s cooking magazine  Or some kind of arctic horror  Next post:dessert.
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Nov 16, 2014 05:31
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| # ? May 6, 2024 01:36 |
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Chocolate cake with dead-ant eggshell cream and false fingernails I subbed in finely grated dark chocolate for the ants, broken meringues for the eggshells and sliced almonds for the false fingernails. When I texted my sister about it, she asked where the baking paper was. I did consider making wafers to represent the baking paper, but I didn't think it would add anything. First, I made a collapsed chocolate souffle cake (I halved my usual recipe). I melted 250grams of Whittakers 62% dark chocolate together with 60 grams of butter in a bowl over simmering water  I separated 3 eggs and whisked the egg yolks with 45 grams of caster sugar until fluffy  I stirred 75mls cream, a tablespoon of whisky, a dash of vanilla, and the melted chocolate into the egg yolks  Then I whisked the egg yolks till soft peaks formed and folded it into the chocolate mixture in two batches   I poured it into a foil lined tin and put it into a 180C/370F oven for 25 minutes until just set.  Then I left it to cool on a rack overnight  I made a batch of meringues with one egg white, 50grams of sugar  ...some orange zest and a dash of orange flower water   They also got left to cool overnight  I toasted some sliced almonds  I grated 100grams of dark chocolate  I whipped a cup of cream with a dash of vanilla and a teaspoon of icing sugar. I roughly crushed the meringues and folded them and most of the grated chocolate into the whipped cream Then I served the cream on the souffle cake sprinkled with the sliced almond "fingernails" and more "dead ant" grated chocolate.  It was delicious and made my sister laugh.
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Nov 16, 2014 05:58
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I can feel the affection in this really excellent tribute. The cake is a truly lovely recipe and a grand joke. Also, our Nan's appear to have gone to the same cooking school, and if her whiskey and ginger of choice was Tullamore Dew and Polar Diet, we may be related.
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Nov 16, 2014 21:13
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Sweet Custom Van posted:I can feel the affection in this really excellent tribute. The cake is a truly lovely recipe and a grand joke. Also, our Nan's appear to have gone to the same cooking school, and if her whiskey and ginger of choice was Tullamore Dew and Polar Diet, we may be related. The whisky may well have been Tullamore Dew. The ginger ale came in a crate. All I can say for certain is that these were the cigarettes: 
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Nov 16, 2014 21:29
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I'll be trying that method for potatoes some time soon, they look fantastic. Great entry!
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Nov 16, 2014 21:56
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bartolimu posted:I'll be trying that method for potatoes some time soon, they look fantastic. Great entry! Do it. They are loving amazing.
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Nov 16, 2014 23:15
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Don't take this the wrong way OP but honestly, the most delicious-looking part of your entry is that pan sauce. I want to drink that straight.
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Nov 17, 2014 17:36
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Holy poo poo those potatoes.  Doing that next chance I get.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:42
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slinkimalinki posted:The whisky may well have been Tullamore Dew. The ginger ale came in a crate. Aww, now I miss my Nana, too. That aside, this was a great post and I want to eat those potatoes.
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Nov 19, 2014 19:59
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I'm making those potatahs the next chance I get. Would vegetable shortening do or do you absolutely recommend animal fat?
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Nov 19, 2014 20:22
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Dunno. I reckon vegetable shortening would do the trick. Wouldn't have the characteristic 1950s dripping taste, though, which could be a plus or a minus. Edit: I was actually talking with my parents on Sunday about whether the dripping was an integral part of the crispiness or not.None of us were entirely sure.
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Nov 19, 2014 20:31
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Made the taties and red wine chicken again tonight. I think they'll become my standard roast.
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Nov 20, 2014 08:20
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Is dripping basically lard, or is it rendered muscle fat? I have never seen a product called dripping sold in the US, so I'm curious.
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Nov 21, 2014 04:38
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Traditionally it was the fat that came off a (beef) roast, but you can buy it in a form similar to lard.
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Nov 21, 2014 09:58
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I wish you could buy it in the US. Oh well, guess I have to make a roast now!
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Nov 23, 2014 04:06
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| # ? May 6, 2024 01:36 |
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SymmetryrtemmyS posted:I wish you could buy it in the US. Oh well, guess I have to make a roast now! Google taught me that there's an ongoing slapfight between Heston Blumenthal and Nigella Lawson as to whether dripping or goose fat is better for roast potatoes: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2508204/Goose-fat-beef-dripping-Celebrity-chefs-war-best-way-roast-potatoes.html
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Nov 23, 2014 05:39
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